Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird

By Gene Andrew Jarrett

The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary history

A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a “caged bird” that sings.

Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents’ survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.

Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780691235158

Book preview

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

PAUL LAURENCE

DUNBAR

The Life and Times of a Caged Bird

GENE ANDREW JARRETT

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2022 by Gene Andrew Jarrett

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Published by Princeton University Press

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All Rights Reserved

First paperback printing, 2023

Paper ISBN 9780691254760

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Names: Jarrett, Gene Andrew, 1975– author.

Title: Paul Laurence Dunbar: the life and times of a caged bird / Gene Andrew Jarrett.

Description: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021033992 (print) | LCCN 2021033993 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691150529 (hardback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780691235158 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 1872–1906. | Poets, American—19th century—Biography. | African American poets—Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC PS1557.J37 2022 (print) | LCC PS1557 (ebook) | DDC 811/.4 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033992

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033993

Version 1.1

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Anne Savarese and James Collier

Production Editorial: Ellen Foos

Text Design: Karl Spurzem

Jacket/Cover Design: Lauren Michelle Smith

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Jodi Price and Carmen Jimenez

Copyeditor: Daniel Simon

Jacket/Cover image: Paul Laurence Dunbar at age 19. Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection / Ohio History Connection

For the Boynton-Jarrett Family

and

in memory of

Toni Morrison

(1931–2019)

FIG. 0.0. Paul Laurence Dunbar, circa 1890. (Paul Laurence Dunbar Small Picture Collection, Ohio History Connection)

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—

I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;

For he must fly back to his perch and cling

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars

And they pulse again with a keener sting—

I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—

I know why the caged bird sings!

—PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, SYMPATHY, LYRICS OF THE HEARTHSIDE (1899)¹

CONTENTS

List of Illustrationsxi

INTRODUCTION1

PART ONE: BROKEN HOME, BEGINNINGS TO 1893

CHAPTER 1. Broken Country15

CHAPTER 2. Broken Home47

CHAPTER 3. Public Schooling77

CHAPTER 4. The Tattler91

CHAPTER 5. A Superior Gift110

CHAPTER 6. Career Choices131

CHAPTER 7. The White City152

PART TWO: A TRUE SINGER, 1893 TO 1898

CHAPTER 8. Chafing at Life173

CHAPTER 9. The Bond of a Fellow-Craft188

CHAPTER 10. Heroine of His Stories206

CHAPTER 11. A True Singer217

CHAPTER 12. England as Seen by a Black Man239

CHAPTER 13. East Coast Strivings263

CHAPTER 14. The Way Is Dark278

CHAPTER 15. The Wizard of Tuskegee294

PART THREE: THE DOWNWARD WAY, 1898 TO 1906

CHAPTER 16. The Wedding of Plebeians307

CHAPTER 17. Our New Madness327

CHAPTER 18. Still a Sick Man351

CHAPTER 19. A Sac of Bitter Sarcasm372

CHAPTER 20. Old Habits Die Hard390

CHAPTER 21. The Downward Way408

CHAPTER 22. Waiting in Loafing-Holt421

Epilogue449

Acknowledgments461

Notes467

Index523

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 0.0. Paul Laurence Dunbar, circa 1890.

Fig. 1.1. Matilda Dunbar, circa 1890.

Fig. 1.2. Fugitive slave paths through Kentucky and beyond.

Fig. 1.3. Routes of fugitive escape on the Underground Railroad, 1860.

Fig. 2.1. Conservatory and garden of Dayton’s Central Branch, circa 1876.

Fig. 2.2. Belva Ann Lockwood.

Fig. 3.1. Central High School, Dayton, Ohio, 1857–1893.

Fig. 3.2. Paul and his Central High School classmates, with Orville Wright in back row, center, circa 1890.

Fig. 3.3. Orville and Wilbur Wright, circa 1897–1899.

Fig. 4.1. Paul and classmates in Philomathean Society, Central High School, 1890.

Fig. 4.2. First issue of the Dayton Tattler (December 13, 1890).

Fig. 4.3. Dayton Central High School commencement program, June 16, 1891.

Fig. 5.1. James Whitcomb Riley, circa 1898.

Fig. 5.2. Paul Laurence Dunbar, circa 1892.

Fig. 7.1. Exposition grounds, World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893.

Fig. 7.2. Frederick Douglass, 1893.

Fig. 7.3. Will Marion Cook, n.d.

Fig. 9.1. Alice Ruth Moore, circa 1895.

Fig. 9.2. Dr. Henry A. Tobey, n.d.

Fig. 11.1. Front page of Harper’s Weekly, June 27, 1896.

Fig. 11.2. William Dean Howells, circa 1900.

Fig. 11.3. Frontispiece of Majors and Minors (1895).

Fig. 11.4. Paul with Brand Whitlock, mayor of Toledo, Ohio, outside the home of Major James Pond, Paul’s literary agent, 1896.

Fig. 12.1. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, circa 1905.

Fig. 12.2. Frontispiece of Lyrics of Lowly Life (1898).

Fig. 12.3. Paul with friends in England, 1897.

Fig. 13.1. Paul at Berean Baptist Church, Washington, D.C., November 14, 1897.

Fig. 15.1. Booker T. Washington, circa 1895.

Fig. 16.1. Advertisement of Clorindy in Harper’s Weekly (1898).

Fig. 16.2. Charles Waddell Chesnutt, n.d.

Fig. 17.1. Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., circa 1897.

Fig. 17.2. Sample decorated page and photograph from The Deserted Plantation, in Poems of Cabin and Field (1899).

Fig. 18.1. Theodore Roosevelt, circa 1906.

Fig. 18.2. James Weldon Johnson, circa 1900.

Fig. 18.3. Paul with his mother, Matilda, circa 1896.

Fig. 18.4. Paul and Alice Dunbar en route to Colorado, 1899.

Fig. 18.5. Paul Laurence Dunbar on horseback, circa 1900.

Fig. 20.1. Paul and friends with his mother, Matilda (back row), n.d.

Fig. 20.2. Paul with a friend outside of Dayton home, circa 1905.

Fig. 22.1. Bert Williams and George Walker, In Dahomey, with words by Paul Laurence Dunbar and music by Will Marion Cook (1902).

Fig. 22.2. Home of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 219 North Summit Street, Dayton, Ohio, circa 1900.

Fig. 22.3. Advertisement for Paul’s recital with Joseph Douglass, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1901.

Fig. 22.4. Paul giving a recital at the National Cash Register Company, Dayton, Ohio, January 6, 1903.

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Introduction

In the October 1914 issue of the A.M.E. Review, an author named Alice M. Dunbar (1875–1935) published The Poet and His Song, reflecting on the life and character of her former husband, the legendary African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906).¹ When they first corresponded in April 1895, she went by the full name of Alice Ruth Moore; she was nineteen years old, he twenty-two. Their epistolary courtship lasted nearly two years, until they became engaged in early February 1897. In March 1898 they married; and in January 1902 they separated abruptly, without having children together. Despite his pleas for forgiveness, which she unfailingly ignored, they never reunited.² In print and in person, turbulence described the six years and nine months of their relationship: infatuation and love, admiration and encouragement, but also suspicion and frustration, exasperation and fury, as well as intimidation and violence.

Even though Alice published The Poet and His Song almost nine years after Paul’s death, she retained the surname Dunbar.³ In fact, the essay marked her first-ever published study of why Paul perceived the world the way he did. So if one wishes to get a correct idea of any poet whatever, she explains at the outset, he must delve beneath the mere sordid facts of life and its happenings; of so many volumes published in such and such a time; of the influence upon him of this or that author or school of poetry; of the friends who took up his time, or gave him inspiration, and, above all, one must see what the love of Nature has done for the poet. Alice’s essay seeks to render more human, if more profound and complex, a person she once loved but later came to resent during his lifetime—and after his death in 1906, a person she had eventually come to appreciate. The title poet laureate of his race, which Paul assumed during the height of his professional career, underestimated the sophistication of his poetry.⁴

In lyrical prose, Alice describes the poems Paul wrote that best mirrored his unique literary sensibility.⁵ One of these poems was Sympathy, published in his fourth book of poetry, Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899). The bird’s cage, according to Alice, actually referred to the iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress, where the torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. Paul worked at the Library of Congress from September 1897 through October 1898; during this period, a series of illnesses cut short his employment there. (The dry dust of the dry books … rasped sharply in his hot throat, she remembered.) What had initially been the proverbial job to die for turned into a job that was killing his body and spirit. Being a poet shut up in an iron cage with medical works was ironic incongruity, Alice wrote. Among the stacks Paul was not a patron but a prisoner; now he understood how the bird felt when it beat its wings against its cage.⁶

Alice could very well have been overstating the misery surrounding the nature of Paul’s job in the Library of Congress. Others who witnessed him there tell a different story, suggesting that the Library of Congress, for all its faults as an oppressive work environment, could never truly suppress Paul’s brilliant sense of not only literary time and place but also how distinctive forms of art, such as music and poetry, could converge, stimulate his imagination, and move audiences.⁷

Although its autobiographical basis in Paul’s stint at the Library of Congress may be debatable, the poem Sympathy nonetheless testifies in profound, existential ways to the miraculous and transcendent bond between the poet and the world. The poem highlights the direct ratio of the poet to sympathy—to the knowledge, as the poem’s speaker puts it, of three refrains: what the caged bird feels, why the caged bird beats his wing, and why the caged bird sings. Paul struggled with the belief that he lived and wrote like a bird trapped in a cage, however gilded it might have been by the acclaim of admirers. The poem would reverberate in the century after its publication, its lyrical poignancy and thematic cogency extended in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).⁸ In its depiction of how a young black girl could grow and achieve a personal sense of dignity in the face of rampant racism and sexism, Angelou’s autobiography reveals the perennial relevance of Dunbar’s original song: a caged bird beating its wings is the story of the individual imprisoned by societal preconceptions and struggling to escape.

Describing the life and times of Paul Laurence Dunbar requires that we tell this story. Prodigious and prolific, he was a serious professional writer for a total of eighteen years, from 1888 until his death. During this time he released fourteen books of poetry, four collections of short stories, and four novels, a body of work that showcased his mastery of literary genres—the Western lyric, the Romantic poetry of England, the Fireside or Schoolroom poetry of the United States, the realism and naturalism of American fiction, the racial uplift of African American literature, and the dialect of informal English. Newspapers and magazines across the country syndicated many of the individual texts in his eighteen books of poems and short stories. Across various mainstream and obscure periodicals, he also published essays on the progress, productivity, and challenges of African Americans from the era of slavery to newfound franchise and freedom in the decades after the Civil War. (For Paul himself, the achievements of his life and literature, whether accurately or not, served as his benchmarks of racial progress.) To wide acclaim, he recited his poems or delivered speeches in private homes, churches, schools, and auditoriums across America’s East Coast and Midwest as well as in England’s cities. And he drafted experimental works, including librettos and drama, that exhibited his prodigious artistic versatility. The quality, breadth, and diversity of his literature inspired countless people around the world.

A biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, however, cannot be merely a story of the intellectual ideas that informed the way he wrote literature. Nor can it be only an exploration of the mental, emotional, and moral compass by which he oriented himself in the world. It must also recount the wider historical forces that inevitably shaped his personality—the forces that guided the various personal and professional choices that lay before him and that, he believed, would determine the course of his life, career, and legacy. One must tell the full story of an African American who privately wrestled with the constraints of America in the Gilded Age, but who also sought to express or mitigate this strife through the written and spoken word.⁹

Reared during and after Reconstruction, Paul belonged to a generation of African Americans—of so-called New Negroes—whose parents had been enslaved and who were adjusting to the capitalist modernity of America. It was a time when the man of letters had to become a man of business, as William Dean Howells—the so-called Dean of American Letters, a renowned critic and writer who had become one of Paul’s most influential patrons—acknowledged in 1893: unless he sells his art he cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly true.¹⁰ But it also was a time when such an edict leaned on an expectation that African Americans who sought to make a living through literary writing had to tailor it to racial stereotypes. Professional opportunities for such writers were limited to certain types of writing, including the depiction of undereducated dialect or African Americans in the racist mold of blackface minstrelsy. Autobiographical undertones about how Paul himself faced this conundrum can be found in his poem The Poet, included in his 1903 collection Lyrics of Love and Laughter:

He sang of life, serenely sweet,

With, now and then, a deeper note.

From some high peak, nigh yet remote,

He voiced the world’s absorbing beat.

He sang of love when earth was young,

And Love, itself, was in his lays.

But ah, the world, it turned to praise

A jingle in a broken tongue.¹¹

Paul resented how much the world underappreciated his literary skills and creativity. The facts corroborate his belief. Critics, editors, publishers, patrons, and fellow writers rarely acknowledged publicly, or even privately, Paul’s ability to experiment with the various traditions of Western poetry in formal English—from the lyric to the ballad, the rondeau to the sonnet—beyond the stereotypical language of African American dialect he likewise happened to know and write so well. To Alice especially, he complained about how these circumstances so unfairly limited him, about how they forced him to bear a burden of racial authenticity more onerous than what any other African American writer of his era had to shoulder.

Nonetheless, and perhaps ironically, Paul overcame these personal reservations and social conditions to write and recite dialect in ways unprecedented in their artistic excellence and commercial success.

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To make proper sense of Paul Laurence Dunbar, one has to begin his story well before his birth on June 27, 1872. One must understand the antebellum lives of his parents, Joshua Dunbar and Matilda Murphy, as Kentucky slaves; their separate experiences during the Civil War; their acculturation to the postwar city of Dayton, Ohio, where Paul was born; and their combustible marriage, violent exchanges, and eventual divorce. As Paul matured, he came to embody contradictions while rebelling against the world’s stifling expectations. He tried to be a faithful boyfriend or husband to women, but his wandering eyes betrayed his pleas of fidelity. Alcoholism afflicted his father and eventually overtook him, too, to the horror or fascination of sober onlookers. Paul enjoyed reading, writing, and reciting literature in formal English, but the commercial vogue for the persona and dialect of the so-called Old Negro, or of the undereducated, docile slave, pressured him at times to change course to improve the sales of his published literature. Racial politics divided the African American intelligentsia into partisan camps either supportive or critical of the industrial ethos of the most famous African American educator at the turn of the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington. As Paul’s perspective on racial progress evolved, he would come to support both camps at different times. Under such duress, the conflicted dimensions of Paul’s personality became more manifest. He was a temperamental judge of others’ failings, yet he himself was insecure. Toward the patrons of the white literati he was obsequious, yet with the patriarchs of the black intelligentsia he ingratiated himself. And to multiple women he wrote private letters that alternately expressed extremes of excessive love and merciless condemnation.

The remarkable life and times of Paul Laurence Dunbar break down into three main parts. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, the first section, Broken Home, describes the early lives and eventual challenges of Joshua and Matilda, Paul’s parents; the circumstances and consequences of Paul’s birth and his fatal inheritance of Joshua’s virtues and vices; his rearing in Dayton, Ohio, where he entered an entrepreneurial newspaper partnership with his high school classmate Orville Wright, who would later be known, along with his brother Wilbur, as a co-inventor of the first airplane that could achieve controlled, sustained, and powered flight; and the years leading to 1893, when he published his first book, Oak and Ivy, and befriended the legendary African American abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Spanning five eventful years, the second section, A True Singer, bookends the era when Paul entered his literary prime and tried to grasp what being a professional African American writer meant. Literature authored by African Americans most excited mainstream audiences when it portrayed the stereotypical dialect of slaves, which became the mythical object of white nostalgia once the Emancipation Proclamation liberated 3 million slaves in 1863 and portended the metaphorical disappearance of their racist caricatures and vernacular. This section traces the origin and growth of his infatuation with Alice, leading to their tumultuous courtship and engagement; and it highlights the extent of Paul’s personal and professional reach to the era’s rising political stars. The final section, The Downward Way, begins in 1898 with his marriage to Alice, the joy of which was tempered over time by episodes of his grave illnesses, his confusing negotiations with editors and publishers, his financial obligations to support his mother, and his erratic behavior worsened by an irrepressible and obscene addiction to liquor.

A prominent part of this book involves analyzing Paul’s volatile relationship with Alice, whose own comprehensive biography is long overdue and which accrues more information from the research I have conducted. I plumb his professional networks, which included patrons and politicians on both sides of the so-called color line. White men whom he came to know and admire included the writers James Newton Matthews, James Whitcomb Riley, and William Dean Howells; the medical doctor Henry Archibald Tobey; and Theodore Roosevelt, a government official he revered and reached out to—a gesture that this governor of New York and, later, president of the United States reciprocated. Others in Paul’s orbit were legendary African American intellectuals of his time, including Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington above all, and to a lesser degree the musician Will Marion Cook, the writer James Weldon Johnson, the activist Alexander Crummell, the author Victoria Earle Matthews, and, in England, composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Paul’s countless interactions with editors and publishers, from the renowned Major James Pond and his daughter, Edith, to Frank Dodd of the publisher Dodd, Mead, reveal how he navigated the perks and pitfalls that accompanied his sudden rise to literary celebrity.

In portraying Paul’s life, I attend especially to how broad historical forces shaped his personal, public, and professional identities. Newspapers, magazines, and recitals, in the United States and during his six-month tour of England in 1897, dictated his tactics and strategies to broaden his literary appeal for commercial gain. Political factors in the postwar stability of American society—including the period of Reconstruction (circa 1865–1877), the nomination of William McKinley for president (in 1896), and the gubernatorial and then presidential rise of Theodore Roosevelt (from 1899 to 1901)—played a hand in his access to elite constituencies of readers and sources of political power. The customs of racial taxonomy defined and authenticated his blackness, to be sure, while segregationist policies for public interaction between blacks and whites limited his social mobility and his professional opportunities. And he gravitated to the great minds of literature in the extensive library that he built over time and collected in Loafing-Holt, the second-floor study in his final Dayton home, where he died on February 9, 1906.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African American born after slavery—that is, the first modern African American writer—to achieve commercial prosperity and international stature exclusively by his literary works. But he was not just a writer of literature. Although only an occasional librettist and lyricist for musicals, he nevertheless helped achieve two unprecedented milestones in the history of American culture: he wrote the libretto for the first musical with a full African American cast to appear on Broadway, a one-act show called Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk, which premiered in 1898; and he wrote the lyrics for In Dahomey, which debuted in 1902 as the first full-length Broadway musical to be both written and performed by African Americans.

Despite these accomplishments, the blessing and curse of Paul’s celebrity status compelled him to behave in extreme or unpredictable ways, ranging from his poised and gentlemanly decorum during his trip to England to the shameful misbehavior in—to repeat Alice’s lament—the mere sordid facts of life and its happenings. Like a poem, the essential meaning of Paul’s life and literature defies easy paraphrase.

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Since the late 1960s, academic and public interest in Paul Laurence Dunbar has steadily risen, coinciding with the centennial of his death in 2006 and the sesquicentennial of his birth in 2022.¹² The election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States likewise inspired scholars of American history to examine precedent circumstances under which African Americans aspired for high political office and intellectual leadership. Many scholars have gravitated toward Reconstruction, the era lasting roughly from 1865 to 1877, when Dunbar happened to be born and reared and when his early mind matured. During this time, the federal government sought not only to restore to the Union the eleven southern states that allied with the Confederacy during the Civil War (1861–1865) but also to consummate the constitutional franchise of African Americans in the wake of their emancipation from slavery.¹³ My biography hinges on the very cultural, political, and ideological implications of Reconstruction for Paul’s phenomenal emergence in the late nineteenth century as a leading writer, intellectual, and spokesperson for his race.

During Reconstruction, so-called Radical Republicans employed a vocabulary of higher law that anchored the arguments for African American franchise to the idealistic republican principles of the nation’s founding almost a century prior, during the Revolutionary War. Although not unanimous in strategy or conviction, the Radical Republicans objected to the immorality of slavery and its denial of the natural rights of African Americans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even though federal emancipation in 1863 undermined slavery, ingrained prejudice after the Civil War perpetuated the constitutional disfranchisement of African Americans. The Radical Republicans turned to an obscure provision in the Constitution that assured each state a Republican government. In another sense, the provision granted the federal government and its supporters license to intervene in state practices and enforce the entitlements of citizenship. According to historian Eric Foner, A government that denied any of its citizens equality before the law and did not rest fully on the consent of the governed could not be considered republican.¹⁴

A host of constitutional amendments established the newfound franchise of African Americans after the Civil War: the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which formally ended slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which accorded citizenship to African Americans and certified the rights of citizens to due process and equality before the law; and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which declared the rights of citizens to vote regardless of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, and 1875 aimed to add further legal protections and assurances of equal treatment for African Americans. For a time, the core equivalence between Revolutionary-era republicanism and Reconstruction-era radicalism governed the progress of African Americans in the postbellum era. Under these postwar circumstances, African American men who served in the Union Army returned to their home states to reunite with family members (if they could be found) and look for work.

However, the notion that the federal government could control the conduct of individual states, particularly those in the South, fueled controversy. As the postwar tool of Radical Republicans to enfranchise African Americans and protect their rights as citizens, Reconstruction could not progress unencumbered. Constitutional cornerstones began to crack and buckle beneath the pressure imposed by the more resentful and retrogressive elements of American society, jurisprudence, and politics. For example, in December 1874 the Forty-third Congress assembled in the wake of Democratic domination of that year’s elections, weakening the grip of Republicans on both the White House and Congress. (Ten years would elapse before the Republicans again commanded both branches.)

For each electoral advantage that Democrats gained, African Americans despaired that the nation took one step closer to the reinstitution of slavery. Slowly but surely, Democrats were reassuming the governmental helm of southern states. In April 1877 the southern Democrats conceded that Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate for president the previous year, could be declared winner over their own candidate, Samuel Tilden, under two conditions: first, southern and northern capitalists had to work together to ensure the industrial and economic revitalization of Confederate territories, and second, Hayes had to remove federal troops from southern state capitals, where they had been sent to supervise contentious gubernatorial and legislative elections. The so-called Compromise of 1877 began to nullify the Republican principles of Reconstruction that ultimately secured the political franchise of African Americans. As one Kansas Republican stated in February of that year, I think the policy of the new administration will be to conciliate the white men of the South. Carpetbaggers to the rear, and niggers take care of yourselves.¹⁵

Juridical rollbacks accompanied the electoral compromise. Most notably, in the 1873 Slaughter-House cases and the 1876 cases United States v. Cruikshank and United States v. Reese, the Supreme Court weakened federal ability to uphold the liberties and due process of citizens, their right to assembly, and their right to vote, especially when these entitlements, in this court’s view, conflicted with the individual jurisdiction and will of the states. Ironically, the very laws that once shielded the lives and franchise of African Americans in the South now exposed them to terrorist violence. Random white mobs and formalized, paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan plundered the homes of African Americans and castrated, raped, and lynched African American men with impunity. Additional laws designed to save citizens from being victims of fraud and corruption seemed inapplicable to African Americans.¹⁶

Political disfranchisement amplified the legal vulnerability of African Americans in postbellum times. During this period, as historian Nell Irving Painter rightly notes, blacks never held political office in proportion to their numbers, and any black representation at all was a novelty.¹⁷ The electoral relegation of African Americans to the lower congressional chamber—the House of Representatives, as opposed to the upper one, the Senate—starkly attested to this disproportion. For African Americans and their supporters, minimal representation was better than no representation at all.

Most whites believed, in contrast, that they would suffer if the political status quo improved or even remained the same for African Americans. As the Reconstruction period of emancipation and enfranchisement faded in national memory, racist efforts to undo these political attainments grew emboldened and systematic. Eventually, these efforts became victorious in their own right. Discouraging African Americans from running for the House of Representatives and relegating them to less prestigious and powerful posts, such as state legislatures and city councils, were tactics espoused by vocal Democratic constituencies and neglected by the deafening silence of Republican acquiescence.

By the Compromise of 1877, anti-Reconstruction sentiment in the media had reached a crescendo. Punditry in periodicals and books ranged from the Democratic criticism of government to the broader allegation, condoned by many white conservatives and liberals, southerners and northerners alike, that African Americans were fundamentally incapable of representing themselves in the realm of intellect, much less politics. The hallmark egalitarianism of Reconstruction gave way to the purportedly more realistic and practical, but essentially white-supremacist, doctrine of Redemption. Spearheaded by secessionist Democrats and Union Whigs, Redemption sought to ensure Reconstruction’s utter failure.

Historians have shown that racial progress in the nineteenth century culminated with the Reconstruction-era electoral victories of the first African American congressmen and judges. Politicians and, less directly, cultural leaders emerged from African American communities to guide ideological discussions on how electoral politics could combat racial prejudice, injustice, and inequality, and how laws could work on behalf of African American progress toward complete civil rights.¹⁸ Recent scholarship has enabled the discovery of new archives and literary forms emergent during and in the wake of Reconstruction, such as in association with the African American writers Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Paul Laurence Dunbar himself. The unfinished revolution suggested by Eric Foner in his classic 1989 book Reconstruction encourages a historiography that extends the story about the analogous opportunities and challenges of African Americans from the postbellum nineteenth century into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.¹⁹

A comprehensive biography of Paul’s life and times enables us to grasp the personal and creative choices he made while maturing into a professional literary writer on the heels of Reconstruction, when he became an emblem of modern African American letters but also a key protagonist in the epic story of race relations in America. Only recently have literary experts begun to pursue this wider lens of analysis, revising the long-held premise that his dialect poetry waged merely a masked critique of the white racism, invisible to white readers but legible to black audiences.²⁰ The meaning and consequences of his life and literature turned out to be more complex than that.

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Writing a biography of a famous American writer—especially in the case of Paul Laurence Dunbar, born of African descent less than a decade from slavery’s end—invites a host of challenges. Some difficulties include the process of selecting the most relevant details for biographical inclusion; overcoming the practical limits suffered by the African American archive during the era and aftermath of slavery; cutting through the myths of his celebrity to the facts of his life; and capturing the essence of his writings, despite how numerous, dispersed, and sensationalized their publications. Perhaps the greatest challenge was documenting only the portion of the literature, life, and legacy of his wife, Alice, that revolved about his experiences, even though recent scholarly interest, including my own, in her historical significance and literary accomplishments continues to grow, and even though she deserves her own independent biography, one comprehensive enough to tell her life story in all its complexity, wonder, and inspiration. I describe these largely academic issues in the epilogue to this biography, whose conceptual and methodological puzzles rivaled the various puzzles embodied by Dunbar himself.

By the end of this book, new features in Paul’s portrait should emerge even for experts in his life and literature. First, he was more concerned and frustrated with the plight and practices of African American communities than the standard record suggests. Evidence of this sentiment appeared in the editorials he wrote for the Dayton Tattler, the newspaper he edited and circulated for the African American Dayton community in December 1890; in the frequency with which he wrote poems in formal English, not in the dialect suggestive of African American vernacular; in his resistance to using African American protagonists in his early novels; in his and Alice’s private rebukes of fellow African Americans; and in his oscillations between agreement and disagreement with Washington’s doctrine of racial uplift. Second, he was more mentally and emotionally unstable than the standard record suggests. Private letters of correspondence between Paul and Rebekah Baldwin tell us that she, a lesser-known girlfriend on the margins of previous biographies, is crucial when attempting to fathom the unpredictable personality and behavior that he would demonstrate later in his more notorious relationship with Alice. His letters to Alice reveal that he expressed suicidal thoughts in regret of having committed violence against her. And throughout his life, he expressed deep disappointment with the course and outcome of his career.

Just as the caged bird, as Paul deploys the term in Sympathy, represents a biographical metaphor of the societal constraints on his life and literature, For the Man Who Fails, a poem also appearing in Lyrics of the Hearthside, reveals his inner turmoil. In this poem, the speaker addresses the noble heart and mind / Of the gallant man who fails, not only the man who wins the game and earns Fame. An intervention of sorts, the closing of the poem imagines a tale of redemption before it is too late, before history casts a fatal glance upon the life and legacy of the gallant man:

We sit at life’s board with our nerves highstrung,

And we play for the sake of Fame,

And our odes are sung and our banners hung

For the man who wins the game.

But I have a song of another kind

Than breathes in these fame-wrought gales,—

An ode to the noble heart and mind

Of the gallant man who fails!

The man who is strong to fight his fight,

And whose will no front can daunt,

If the truth be truth and the right be right,

Is the man that the ages want.

Tho’ he fail and die in grim defeat,

Yet he has not fled the strife,

And the house of Earth will seem more sweet

For the perfume of his life.²¹

PART ONE

Broken Home, Beginnings to 1893

CHAPTER 1

Broken Country

And their deeds shall find a record,

In the registry of Fame;

For their blood has cleansed completely

Every blot of Slavery’s shame.

So all honor and all glory

To those noble Sons of Ham—

The gallant colored soldiers,

Who fought for Uncle Sam!

—PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, THE COLORED SOLDIERS, MAJORS AND MINORS (1895)¹

Paul Laurence Dunbar was quite bright for a four-year-old. At this age he was learning to read and write, a process his mother, Matilda, began before his formal schooling even started. As a child, he used a slate tablet on which he learned the typography, enunciation, and meaning of letters and words. Close to the end of his life, he recalled that his mother watered the seeds of his early literacy: My mother, who had no education except what she picked up herself, and who is generally conceded to be a very unusual woman, taught me to read when I was four years old. Matilda could have been deemed unusual for a host of reasons—her indefatigable will, at the end of the Civil War, to flee her birthplace in Kentucky for a small town in Ohio, all while being a single mother expecting her second child from her first husband; her temperamental flashes; her hard-nosed protection of her family; her vulnerable acceptance of a troubled and troubling man, in Joshua Dunbar, who became her second husband and Paul’s father. Equally unusual was her educational resolve, which she shared with Joshua despite the strain in their marriage and the domestic malaise resulting from it. Both my father and herself were fond of books, Paul recalled, and used to read to us as we sat around the fire at night.²

The semicircle of Paul and his older half-brothers, Robert and William Murphy, created the audience. Matilda’s handwritten letters to Paul and her relatives prove that she commanded literacy, which legend says she accumulated over time letter by letter, word by word, ranging from her access to other schoolchildren to her forays into night school. According to Paul, both of his parents valued education; he asserted that his father even played the role of an instructor.³ Despite their domestic hard times, Matilda and Joshua still managed to bring themselves and their sons together, to huddle and cherish stories and language, as a family trying to grasp what had been penned about their race or their times, about their town or their country, while continuing to understand one another.⁴

The stories Paul heard from his mother about the South, about how she survived and left Kentucky, prescribed his vision of the world as long as he lived with her. Here, in the evening, around the fireside, an earlier biographer wrote, was an environment of study, of song, cheer and the lore and romance which had been the background of their forebears. Another wrote that, from his father, Paul obtained a deeper sense of the ways of the South. The voices of Joshua, Matilda, and those friends who were former house slaves and field hands from Southern plantations, and to whom Matilda introduced Paul, inflected the vernacular wisdom in the old plantation language, regaling him with stories entailing humor and pathos. Looking back, Paul attributed the tenor, the music, the ethos of his poetry about the lives of his parents, about their circle of friends, to his memory of these voices. I have heard so many fireside tales of that simple, jolly, tuneful life. Down in the country districts of Kentucky I have seen it all. But the journey of his parents, Joshua and Matilda, was far more complicated than merely a simple, jolly, tuneful life.⁵

Indeed, the story of Paul’s life, of how his characteristic mind and heart evolved from childhood to adulthood and expressed themselves in his personal conduct or literary writings, must begin with the largely untold and difficult story of how his parents survived slavery in Kentucky and, as freed people, built their lives in Ohio, first independently, then together, then apart. Part of this story—particularly, that early period about his father, once an artisanal slave in search of freedom—Paul himself recounted for the sake of his family’s legacy and embellished on behalf of his literary craft.

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Joshua was born in Garrard County, Kentucky, sometime between February and June of 1816.⁶ Established in 1796 as the state’s twenty-fifth county, in commemoration of James Garrard, its second governor, Garrard thrived as one of the most tillable counties in the state.⁷ Joshua’s early life there was comparable to those of Africans and their descendants enslaved in the antebellum South. Typically, the slaves acquired their first names in the English language, as opposed to the native language of an African nation-state, from the merchants that sold them or the masters that afterward owned them. If they did not devise their own names, as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown eventually did, slaves often retained surnames identified with early owners, states historian Hebert H. Gutman, and they and their descendants carried them from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth century, from one owner to another, and from the Upper South to the Lower South.⁸

As a slave, Joshua was counted as property by the state or federal census—if he was even counted at all. Slavery turned millions of Africans and their New World descendants from human beings into a mere type, according to scholar Ian Baucom: a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money.⁹ If Joshua worked as a field hand, he did not do so for long. He was trained as a plasterer, a member of the rarefied class of skilled laborers that distinguished about one out of every four slaves in the antebellum South. They were not the workers whose toil amid fields of crops and cattle, or whose drudgery within and around their masters’ homes, was simply manual in nature and menial in stature. Nor were they of the semiskilled or domestic group of coachmen, gardeners, house servants, and teamsters. Instead, they were the most dignified barrel-makers, blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, harness-makers, masons, millers, painters, plasterers, shoemakers, tanners, wagon-makers, wheelwrights—the artisans and mechanics who, early in life, likely first served their owners as apprentices. Masters only reluctantly sold away their apprenticed or artisan slaves. Hiring local white craftsmen tended to be more expensive. Renting the slaves out to owners or businesses enabled masters to skim off the earnings while retaining their property.¹⁰

By the time Joshua was born, plastering was a special skill in America. The last decade of the eighteenth century had already witnessed the hiring of slaves to help build the District of Columbia’s capitol. (For a little more than the next half-century, the slaves were denied the rights and privileges of the government whose buildings they helped construct.) Artists and scientists alike, plasterers were attentive to the aesthetics and geometries of artisanship. Peter Nicholson, in his 1831 mechanics companion to learning several professional kinds of art, insisted that plastering was useful in the finishing of buildings, and furnishes the interior with elegant decorations, and conduces both to the health and comfort of the inhabitants.

Plastering could be arduous labor. Plasterers mixed and mastered the ingredients of their material. A compound of lime, hair, and sand were boiled down, turning plaster into paste. Slender strips of wood, known as reeds or laths, were latticed across ceilings to support surfaces soon to be plastered. Trowels and hawks carved plaster into globs of paste, to be layered and smoothed over and along walls and ceilings. Maneuvered hand, quirk, or derby floats helped lay down the second coat of plaster. Screeds guided the creation of running moldings. The plaster dried and hardened under watchful eyes. The stucco, the ultimate and finest layer, consummated the artistry. Plastering skill made Joshua invaluable to a slaveowner.¹¹

Plastering deepened Joshua’s view of slavery. Though his ability to read and write was functional at best, his life likely resembled those of other slaves skilled and lucky enough to leave written records of their lives.¹² Joshua was not unlike a young William Wells Brown, of Fayette County, who became the most famous Kentucky-born former slave of the era.¹³ He was like an adolescent Henry Bibb, of Shelby County, the next most widely read slave from the state.¹⁴ And he resembled Lewis Garrard Clarke, of Kentucky’s Madison County, early in life.¹⁵ Skilled slaves were more likely than any other kind not only to desire and imagine freedom but to strategize ways to achieve it. Such behavior was illegal, but its autonomy and ambition were common traits of slave artisans, as was the intelligence to see the link between labor and wages, to imagine ways of taking advantage of this link, and to develop exit strategies in case their slaveowners could not or would not meet their demands as workers.¹⁶ Simply because slave artisans were privileged did not mean that they were satisfied with their lot. Being hired out to other plantations or cities strained their bonds to their families, left them vulnerable to exploitation by new employers, and subjected them to worse conditions of labor.¹⁷

Closer to the end of the nineteenth century, when he was in his late twenties and in his literary prime, Paul published a short story, entitled The Ingrate, set in antebellum Kentucky and recounting the life of Josh Leckler, a slave hired out as an underpaid plasterer and sharing an abbreviated first name. Both of these details coincided with the qualities of Paul’s own father.¹⁸ Josh, according to the story, learns from his master, James Leckler, how to read, write, and cipher, skills that he redeploys to help himself strategically discern whether his contractors are ripping him off. With this learning Josh repays his master not with obedience but with deceit, with being an ingrate: he forges a traveling pass in James’s hand, flees Kentucky, finds his way through Ohio, reaches Canada as a freeman, and returns to America to enlist as a colored soldier in the Union army.

In a fanciful way, The Ingrate enables one to envision Joshua’s whereabouts as a slave, fugitive, and freeperson. Although mostly fiction, the story leans on the actual facts that Paul had gathered over time as a student of African American history and as a child of former slaves. Artisanship, for example, granted both Josh Leckler and Joshua Dunbar exceptional privilege in their slave communities, resembling the stature of Dave the Potter, a legendary slave who worked in South Carolina in the two decades before the Civil War and whose mastery of reading and writing (such as by designing ceramic pottery, etching verses on them, signing them, and financially speculating on his artwork) boosted his social authority.¹⁹

Artisanship also granted slaves practical chances to be free. William Wells Brown, upon being hired out at one point in his life, knew that the opportunity of getting to a land of liberty was gone, at least for the time being. Later, around 1840, he knew the moment had come:

During the last night that I served in slavery, he reflected, I did not close my eyes a single moment. When not thinking of the future, my mind dwelt on the past. The love of a dear mother, a dear sister, and three dear brothers, yet living, caused me to shed many tears. If I could only have been assured of their being dead, I should have felt satisfied; but I imagined I saw my dear mother in the cotton-field, followed by a merciless task-master, and no one to speak a consoling word to her! I beheld my dear sister in the hands of a slave-driver, and compelled to submit to his cruelty! None but one placed in such a situation can for a moment imagine the intense agony to which these reflections subjected me.²⁰

Artisan slaves were most likely to occupy the class of managers, rebels, and leaders within their communities. They were also likely to demonstrate ingenuity and persistence in running away, reaching free land, and avoiding capture. The coincidence resulted, in part, from the ability of runaways to act as hired-out or self-hired slaves in search of a job, or their ability, while at work, to exploit the time and distance away from their masters that they regularly enjoyed and then slip away. Artisans took advantage of this skill set and class status within the slave community to escape.²¹ Skilled in this respect, Joshua, probably in the early to mid-1840s, or in his mid- to late twenties, fled northward when bondage became too much to bear.²²

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On October 5, 1845, Willis and Elizabeth Porter Burton, a married couple enslaved on Squire David Glass’s farm in Fayette County, Kentucky, gave birth to Matilda Jane Burton around the same time that Joshua, nearly thirty years old, was fleeing northward.²³ She was said to have possessed Cherokee Native American ancestry, potentially inherited from her grandmother, Rebecca Porter. By the time Matilda turned five, she was one of fifteen slaves who lived on the farm and one of the eleven children under the age of twenty. In the course of her life, Matilda came to know, to the extent that she could, seven siblings: three brothers, called Alec, Robert, and Willis; and four sisters, named Ann, Ellen, Rebecca, and Priscilla.²⁴

Matilda’s contact with her father, Willis, was superficial. Owned by a different master, Willis dropped by to see his children only periodically, such as Saturday afternoons in the summer. Even so, few things pleased Matilda more than seeing him these afternoons. Jubilant, she and her siblings would sing and dance: Here comes Pappy, here comes Pappy! Still, Matilda could not connect with him. Even Willis’s final reunion with her and her mother, Elizabeth, in Dayton did not leave a lasting impression. Fleeting was his time in her home and in the lives of those Matilda was closest to, such as Elizabeth and her grandmother Rebecca.²⁵

Matilda and her fellow slaves did not love the farm’s owner, Master David. He was an old man, so irritable and hard to get along with, she later remembered. But they loved his son, Thompson, who managed the plantation. (Sarah, the mother, also lived there.)²⁶ Around the age of six, about four years younger than slaves typically began regular work as field hands, Matilda was assigned to minor tasks inside the house.²⁷ Then Thompson fell ill while drinking water in the field and was confined to bed. By his bedside Matilda tended to him. She used an asparagus branch to shoo flies away. His health continued to decline until he died before her eyes. Afterward, she witnessed the grief of Mrs. Glass, who became hysterical, and of Mr. Glass, his old father, who had been so cross with him. Tragedy in the Glass family had been steady, with earlier deaths of their other children: Marshall, at about twelve months in 1827; Sarah Agnes, at age three in 1834; Joseph, at fifteen, in 1835; James, at thirty-one, in 1848; and now Thompson, at twenty-eight, on August 14, 1852.²⁸ Shortly after Thompson died, Mr. and Mrs. Glass—respectively seventy-two and sixty-five in 1852—sold their farm, which they could not manage on their own. The sale of the property tore apart the Burton family, and Matilda was forcefully separated from her mother.²⁹ Matilda moved with Mr. and Mrs. Glass to the farm of Glass relatives Jack and Margaret Venable, in Lexington, the seat of Fayette County and one of Kentucky’s major cities.³⁰

FIG. 1.1. Matilda Dunbar, circa 1890. (Courtesy of the Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection, Ohio History Connection)

Matilda’s labor in the homes of the Glasses and the Venables attested to the hardship enslaved girls and women faced in antebellum Kentucky. The home was the locus of the slave girl’s obligation to the master’s family, which in turn imposed a set of duties that stressed both her lower status and the vulnerability of her own enslaved family. A compact, volatile, and somewhat isolated society, writes historian Jacqueline Jones, the slaveholder’s estate represented, in microcosm, a larger drama in which physical force combined with the coercion embedded in the region’s political economy to sustain the power of whites over blacks and men over women.³¹ Matilda worked to preserve the quality of life of her master’s family or of his extended family. She had to tend to the sick, as she previously had done for Thompson; care for any small child; serve the master and mistress individually, along with any relatives residing on the estate; cook the meals, often with dangerously sharp knives, sometimes over open hearths; clean the house and all its recesses; launder clothes in tubs and pots or in the creek outdoors; iron the garments while not getting burned, and hoist loads of them throughout the residence. Domestic work rivaled the strain of fieldwork.³²

Matilda also faced, as many female slaves did, the seasonal move from housework to harvesting. (Children her age often were told to act as scarecrows or lug water to field hands.) From July or August to December of every year, for about fourteen hours per day, she faced the prospect of accompanying the male slaves in handling the plow, the hoe, or the sack of 150 pounds of cotton. And she likely knew that even pregnant women were not absolved of this task. Every one of them was still counted as at least half a hand. They had to do the backbreaking outdoor labor like everyone else.³³

In 1853, after having lived at the Venable home in Lexington for no more than a year, Matilda moved to Louisville, about eighty miles west, to the home of Robert K. White, whom she would later call a son-in-law of deceased Thompson Glass. From here she was hired out to a number of other homes in Louisville, the first belonging to William and Elizabeth Timewell. When Colonel White first took Matilda to Elizabeth Timewell, the elderly lady—who, like her husband, had been born in England and was then about seventy years old—surveyed the child. How old is this girl? Mrs. Timewell asked. She is seven, Mr. White replied. This was the first time Matilda realized her own age. It marked the year to which she would later refer in calculating her birthdate, her movements as an adolescent from one master or employer to the next, and her age at any subsequent moment in history. For the next three years, Matilda worked mainly for Mrs. Timewell and continued to see her even when she moved on to the service of different masters. On occasion she took up residence in Mrs. Timewell’s home.³⁴

From about 1854 to 1859, Mr. White hired Tillie, as Matilda was also called, to perform a range of odd jobs for other families: she nursed a two-year-old, shoveled snow, got an employer’s relative ready for a wedding. Her jobs varied in location: some were in Louisville, which was in Jefferson County; others were in Shelby County, the eastern neighbor. I had a number of places, Matilda once reflected, regarding this time. Some of the people I worked for were not good to me; but the people who owned me were kind and indulgent and would not compel me to stay at a place if I didn’t like it. If at any time an employer were cruel, Matilda would soon inform Mr. White, who would return with her the next workday and correct the misconduct. She is nothing but a child, he would admonish.³⁵

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Joshua chose the most historic, if most perilous, kind of flight. By leaving permanently, he defied not only his master but also the laws that defined him as property subject to the discretion of a slaveowner. Early Kentucky slave statutes and the extradition clause of the United States Constitution established, certainly by 1850, the classification and prosecution of slaves as runaways whenever they abandoned plantations for free territories. Urgency fueled his escape. Aside from lashings, both public and private, he likely feared being sold to a state farther south, where flight to free soil would have entailed much longer travel across slave territories.

No other free state was more enticing to Joshua and other Kentucky runaways than Ohio, where antislavery and abolitionist policies dated back to the time of its admission as the seventeenth state in the Union in 1803. African descendants constituted merely 1 percent of the state’s total population, congregated mostly in northeastern Wayne County, after they had fled the South and landed among Native Americans.³⁶ The jurisdiction of Ohio Territory had been adhering to Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlawed slavery in the broader region demarcated by the western and eastern boundaries of the Mississippi River and Pennsylvania and, on the other side, by the northern and southern boundaries of Canada’s rim (above the Great Lakes) and the Ohio River. Fifteen years later—or the year before Ohio entered the union—the Constitutional Convention upheld the law establishing a legislative linchpin of antislavery and abolition rhetoric for decades to come: slavery was prohibited in the Northwest Territory.³⁷

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FIG. 1.2. Fugitive slave paths through Kentucky and beyond.

The cultural and political ideals of Ohio complemented the edict. Former white residents of the South, seeking to be rid of slavery, crossed the border of the Ohio River to settle in the state. New England residents who were far less exposed to slavery than the expatriated southerners also formed a substantial part of Ohio’s diverse migrant community and imbued the state’s community with another facet of largely antislavery sentiment. Only a brief period passed after the 1802 constitutional enforcement of Article VI when slaveholders began to transport their chattel to Ohio and, almost repentantly, relinquish ownership of the human property. Freed, the slaves held dear the official certificate indicating that they would not become a charge of this county in Ohio as long as they henceforth remained in it.³⁸

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FIG. 1.3. Routes of fugitive escape on the Underground Railroad, 1860.

Kentucky slaves gravitated to the Ohio antislavery sentiment, societies, statutes, and advocacy for civil rights. In 1841 a personal liberty guarantee for slaves came from the case State v. Farr, in which an abolitionist was charged with abduction and larceny for telling slaves that they were manumitted once they stepped foot in Ohio. Ultimately, the state’s supreme court ruled in favor of Ohio’s status as free territory and overturned precedent legal opinion to the contrary.³⁹ Since then, free African American communities proliferated throughout the state and identified with the fellow free states of the North. Ohio was accessible only after crossing the Ohio River, also called the river of democracy.⁴⁰

Crossing the Ohio River and navigating the adjacent main streets, however, were exceedingly difficult for runaways like Joshua. Most could not swim, and they did not have time to learn how to do so during their journey. Forging the common border between Kentucky, on one side, and Ohio and Indiana on the other, the treacherous river ranged between one and two miles wide. Tributaries cut into and out of the river’s steep banks, which often rose four hundred feet above water level and in which efflorescent forest trees had taken root. Slaves had to plot how to descend and ascend those banks nimbly and quickly.⁴¹

Joshua and fellow runaways could not ignore the weather’s impact on the Ohio River. The Ohio Basin’s weather was more temperate than the warmer region west of the Mississippi River and the cooler region east of the Appalachian Mountains. Still, the weather fluctuated enough for slaves to consider flight as a seasonal opportunity, just as merchants and tourists regarded their commercial expeditions on the Ohio River. Extreme cases of sweltering summers and frigid winters made flight nearly impossible. Excess precipitation in the spring months of March through May and the autumn months of September through November threatened to flood the main channel and the tributaries with levels of water so high that the weaker and shorter embankments could not restrain the flow. The river became so choppy that flatboat and steamboat captains refrained from navigating upstream or downstream. In such conditions the water was so dangerous that tree debris, like planters and sawyers, lay scattered across it.

Under these circumstances runaways had to sneak onto barges, ferries, and steamships as hirable laborers. Some slave-catchers counteracted this stealth with their own knowledge about the riskiest ravines, the social exclusivity of vessels, and the sometimes equally